“Danceteria mostly.” She risks a quick look at his face. He carries a furtive fantasizing gaze she’s seen too many times before, an awareness of living not only on borrowed money but on borrowed time also.
Then she’s out in the street and everybody is scattering, the Korean tour bus has shown up and the driver and hostesses are in a lively screamfest with their haewoned passengers, Rocky and Cornelia are waving and air-kissing their way into the back of a rented Town Car, Felix is talking earnestly into a mobile phone, and the disguised heavy from the men’s toilet removes his thick plastic frames, puts on a ball cap, adjusts an invisible cloak, and vanishes halfway down the block.
Leaving behind them in the Lucky 18 an empty orchestra playing to an empty room.
15
Around 11:30 in the morning, Maxine spots a substantial black vehicle which reminds her of a vintage Packard only longer, parked near her office, disregarding the signs that say no parking for an hour and a half on that side to allow for street sweeping. Usual practice is for everybody to double-park on the other side and wait for the sweeper to come through, then move back in in its wake and park legally again. Maxine notices that nobody is waiting anywhere near the mystery limo and that, even more curiously, parking enforcement, usually found in this neighborhood like cheetahs at the fringes of antelope herds, is mysteriously absent. Here, in fact, even as she watches, comes the sweeper, wheezing noisily around the corner, then, catching sight of the limo, pausing as if to consider its options. Procedure would be for the sweeper to pull up behind the offending vehicle and wait for it to move. Instead, creeping nervously on up the block, it swerves apologetically around the lengthy ride and hastens to the corner.
Maxine notices a Cyrillic bumper sticker, which as she is shortly to learn reads MY OTHER LIMO IS A MAYBACH, for this vehicle here turns out, actually, to be a ZiL-41047, brought over piece by piece from Russia, reassembled in Brooklyn, and belonging to Igor Dashkov. Maxine, peering through the tinted glass, is interested to find March Kelleher inside, deep in confabulation with Igor. The window cranks down, and Igor puts his head out, along with a Fairway bag which appears to be stuffed with money.
“Maxi, kagdila. Madoff Securities advice was excellent! Just in time! My associates are so happy! Over moon! They took steps, assets are safe, and this is for you.”
Maxine recoils, only partly out of the classic accountant’s allergy to real folding money. “You fuckin insane?”
“Amount you saved them was considerable.”
“I can’t accept this.”
“Suppose we call it retainer.”
“And who’d be hiring me exactly?”
Shrug, smile, nothing more specific.
“March, what’s with this guy? And what are you doing in there?”
“Hop in.” As she does so, Maxine notices that March is sitting there counting a lapful of greenbacks of her own. “No and I’m not the GF either.”
“Let’s see, that leaves what… dope dealer?”
“Shh-shh!” grabbing her arm. For as it turns out, March’s ex-husband Sid has in fact been running substances in and out of the little marina up at Tubby Hook, at the river end of Dyckman Street, and Igor here it seems is one of his clients. “I emphasize ‘running,’ March explains. “Sid, whatever the package might be, he’s just the deliveryperson, never likes to look inside.”
“Because inside this package he doesn’t look in…?”
Well, for Igor it’s methcathinone, also known as bathtub speed, “The bathtub in this case being, my guess is it’s over in Jersey.”
“Sid always has good product,” Igor nods, “not this cheap kitchen-stove Latvian shnyaga which is pink from permanganate they don’t get rid of, before long you are deeply fucked up, like you don’t walk right, you shake? Latvian dzhef, do me a favor, Maxine! don’t go near it, it ain’t dzhef! it’s govno!”
“I’ll try and remember.”
“You had breakfast? We got ice cream here, what kind you like?”
Maxine notices a sizable freezer under the bar. “Thanks, little early in the day.”
“No, no, it’s real ice cream,” Igor explains. “Russian ice cream. Not this Euromarket food-police shit.”
“High butterfat content,” March translates. “Soviet-era nostalgia, basically.”
“Fucking Nestlé,” Igor rooting through the freezer. “Fucking unsaturated vegetable oils. Hippie shit. Corrupting entire generation. I have arrangements, fly this in once a month on refrigerator plane to Kennedy. OK, so we got Ice-Fili here, Ramzai, also Inmarko, from Novosibirsk, very awesome morozhenoye, Metelitsa, Talosto… today, for you, on special, hazelnut, chocolate chips, vishnya, which is sour cherry…”
“Can I maybe just take some for later?”
She ends up with a number of half-kilo Family Packs in an assortment of flavors.
“Thanks, Igor, this all seems to be here,” March stashing the currency in her purse. She’s planning to go uptown tonight to meet Sid and pick up his delivery for Igor. “You ought to come along, Maxi. Just a simple pickup, come on, it’ll be fun.”
“My grasp of the drug laws is a little shaky, March, but last time I checked, this is Criminal Sale of a Controlled Substance.”
“Yes, but it’s also Sid. A complex situation.”
“A B felony. You and your ex—I gather you’re still… close?”
“Don’t leer, Maxi, it causes wrinkles,” climbing out of the ZiL, waiting for Maxine. “Remember to count what’s in your Fairway bag, there.”
“Why, when I don’t even know how much it’s supposed to be to begin with, see what I’m saying.”
There’s a cart with coffee and bagels on the corner. It’s warm today, they find a stoop to sit on and take a coffee break.
“Igor says you saved them a shitload of money.”
“You think that ‘them’ includes Igor himself?”
“He’d be too embarrassed to tell anybody. What was going on?”
“Some kind of pyramid racket.”
“Oh. Something a little different.”
“You mean for Igor? like he has some history with—”
“No, I meant late capitalism is a pyramid racket on a global scale, the kind of pyramid you do human sacrifices up on top of, meantime getting the suckers to believe it’s all gonna go on forever.”
“Too heavy-duty for me, even the scale Igor’s on makes me nervous. I’m more comfortable with people who hang around at ATMs, that level.”
“So later for the gritty street drama, come on uptown for some high fantasy, these Dominican guys, you know?”
“Hmmm. I could manage some old-school merengue maybe.”
MARCH IS MEETING SID at Chuy’s Hideaway, a dance club near Vermilyea. The minute they step off the subway, which up here runs elevated high over the neighborhood, they can hear music. They go sashaying more than schlepping downstairs to the street, where salsa pulses deeply from the stereo systems of double-parked Caprices and Escalades, from bars, from shoulder-mounted boom boxes. Teenagers knock each other around good-naturedly. Sidewalks are busy, fruit stands open, arrays of mangoes and star fruit, ice-cream carts on the corners doing late business.